Z77 Mobo Roundup II: EVGA, ASRock, Gigabyte, Zotac

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Low-Res: Gaming Tests

For our next series of tests, we moved on to some more in-game benchmarking with Crysis and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. When testing processors with Crysis or ET:QW, we drop the resolution to 1024x768, and reduce all of the in-game graphical options to their minimum values to isolate CPU and memory performance as much as possible. However, the in-game effects, which control the level of detail for the games' physics engines and particle systems, are left at their maximum values, since these actually do place a load on the CPU rather than GPU.

Low-Resolution Gaming: Crysis and ET: Quake Wars

Taking the GPU out of the Equation

Sometimes a few FPSes here and there can make a big difference in the user experience of a game, but not when you're hitting them this high. All the motherboards blazed through these tests, and although (surprise!) the scores were closely clustered, the Gigabyte board edged out the field in both tests. In ET:QW, it's worth noting that the difference between the Gigabyte board and the ASRock board was over 9FPS, though.